Are they testing someone in the same genetic pool that isn't a ginger? Because different ethnic groups are going to be conditioned to respond to and express things differently.
Personally, I have brown hair and a very high pain threshold. Everyone in my family is the same way and none of us are gingers. I further don't think it's genetic in our cases. We have an ingrained and conditioned intolerance to whining in ourselves and others. It's just a family thing. We don't express it and we don't respond to it.
So to take this seriously, I'd need to know they were doing an apples to apples comparison to remove cultural and ethnic distinctions.
Iran is a fascist state. Letting them have nuclear weapons is probably not a good idea. You don't know what they'll do with them.
Understand, if we had some assurence that Iran wouldn't do something crazy with them... then I wouldn't care. The US has no problem with the world having access to cheap abundant energy. To the contrary it is in our interest that as much of the world use such power.
Our worry is that strategically the more powers that have nuclear weapons the less effective MAD becomes at containing nuclear war. It's complicated and you have to understand systems theory to really grasp how the problems becomes exponential. But in a nutshell the more powers that have nuclear weapons the more likely a nuclear war becomes... and it's exponential.
Strategically the US wants to avoid a major nuclear war for as long as possible and try to make sure such a war is as limited as possible. The best way to do that is to limit nuclear weapons to the smallest number of powers possible.
It could be said that Iran and Israel counter each other. Unfortunately Israel is already countered by many other powers in the region. This actually imbalances the relationship requiring increased US backing to keep israel alive. That causes other problems in the world as US resources are finite and cannot always be relied upon.
It's very complicated... but in short... Iran really can't be allowed to have nuclear weapons. It could mean the death of billions if this gets out of control. It will not be limited to a couple nations. Empires will burn.
Hole only needs to be about three feet wide... precision guided bomb can hit that. Furthermore shaped charges can have very specific blast patterns.
For example... lets say the bomb doesn't project much of a blast down but blasts UP. So you drop it and with kinetic force it goes pretty deep into the ground... and then it blasts UP shooting all that dirt and rock out of the hole. Now you've got a shaft... drop another bomb down the same hole. After you've got a hole that goes down a couple hundred feet... drop your big perpetrator bomb that given the head start of those couple hundred feet can eat right through the bunker.
It's also possible the military is lying. The military is very big on lying about stuff when they don't want the enemy to know. It could be that our existing generation of bombs can dig to that depth and destroy everything. So we tell them "oh that's really deep we might not be able to get that." We did that during the first gulf war when we made it look like we were going to invade Iraq by sea. It was a feint. The real attack came over land. We didn't use roads... we crossed the desert with tanks. This put Saddam's forces off balance as they had to scramble away from the coast to cover their rear by which time it was too late for their forces to be effective... and pretty much everything was wiped out without causing relevant US causalities.
Yeah I thought of that. Only the target has to actually be destroyed. If it's all intact down there then they can just dig it out later.
if we hit it, then it has to be completely contaminated and ruined.
As to the hole versus the crater... Possibly we should consider different ways to penetrate. Because if the single perpetrator can't get down and a second one can't follow it down the same hole... then we need to shift to something that makes a wider hole. Not a very wide hole... just wide enough to keep dropping bombs down.
In the US mind, it would require Iran to not only acquire nuclear weapons but to possibly use them first before the US would consider any nuclear strike.
That is not to say we wouldn't use conventional bombs with nuclear level yield. One of the things the military is trying to build is conventional bombs with very high yield.
Look at the size of these bunker buster bombs. It would be much more efficient to use very small tactical nukes.
The explosive yield would be similar in a much smaller package... and scaling up would be very inexpensive.
However, the US is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid using nuclear weapons. Remember... a 1 megaton nuclear weapon is a bomb equivalent to a million tons of TNT. And a tactical nuke could be significantly smaller then a megaton bomb.
How many tons of C4 or some other exotic explosive is required before it really doesn't matter if it was nuclear or not?
That's what the US military wants. They want an UN-nuclear bomb. A bomb that can wipe out pretty much anything without triggering a political food fight.
If the US actually attacks Iran that isn't going to matter and if it doesn't then it doesn't matter.
So it doesn't matter.
to the point of it not mattering... Who says you need to drop one bomb on a target? Can't you just drop a bomb that makes a big crater... and then drop a bomb in the middle of that crater to make a deeper crater... and then drop a bomb in the middle of that crater to make a deeper crater... you see where I'm going here. Doubtless there are diminishing returns but I should think with a few penetrators all on the same target you could eat through to the bunker.
And it's sad that we're here to cheer about something that should have been the status quo in the first place.
The law never should made it illegal to record the police. I suspect this is mostly a law designed to protect slippery government officials from getting snagged by whistle blowers.
I any case... it's disgusting this ever was law in the first place.
The police cannot be a legitimate servant of the law or the people so long as such laws remain on the books. They are entirely and manifestly unacceptable.
They're gross... If I'm going to ban something then I might as well be honest about my motivation for it. Crazy girls are going to be crazy. You're not going to stop girls from starving themselves by removing skinny models anymore then you'll stop crazy boys from killing people by banning video games.
BUUUUT... they're gross... so ban them.
Feel the same way about those female body builders that look like they're smuggling breast implants in their arms. It's really nasty. I'm sure most women feel the same way about body builder men... though frankly that isn't as weird looking as the women who have broader chests then the average linebacker.
I do lots of things that can't be done in front of a computer... like walking or driving...
And I don't blame an art form for the militancy of a tiny minority in it's publishing industry that have created this monster.
Many artists are more against the RIAA then you are...
I think something the studio heads need to grasp is that the music going public has lost a lot and they're trying to get it back by often illegal means.
We can't even sell our digital downloads... where as past generations could resell music.
If the RIAA wants to get the current generation to take them seriously then they need to compromise somewhere. Strike a balance.
The RIAA needs to stop treating the public like the enemy or the public will treat the RIAA the same.
Paying off a bunch of politicians and running a little secret program to radically change the laws overnight without a proper public debate was a hostile act.
Stop doing that or you'll be regarded henceforth as an enemy to be wiped out.
Australia hasn't developed it's interior... the US has... they're not comparable. Remove a few big cities from Australia and there is very little there. Remove the same from the US and most of the country is still there.
It's night and day.
In any case, the politicians have made a miscalculation in thinking this would be acceptable. The only people with a chance of holding office are going to be people that say somewhere in their campaign speech "and we'll get gas prices down"...
You're right that within the european economies the high taxes will be competitive because all companies will have to pay them. But that doesn't mean that growth would be the same.
If the company has LESS capital to invest and the consumer has LESS capital to make purchases then you will depress growth.
First off, we have radically reduced our fuel consumption. US fuel use has gone WAAAAY down. We can't use less then we're using right now. So conservation is no longer useful. Our consumption has gone way down and the prices have just gotten higher.
So our consumption is not linked to the prices nor can we lower our consumption further.
Second, reducing fuel consumption is not a great objective. We have been increasing out efficiency for generations. We do not need politicians intentionally making things worse.
Third, I do have a birthright to cheap fuel actually. My country has lots of untapped petroleum that could be processed into fuel cheaply. So I do have birthright to it.
Fourth, as I live in a democracy, my hostility can very easily be channeled into political action that will get what I want in the near future. So... wrong again.
Fifth, as to magic... not magic... Science. We've got huge oil strikes in the US that rely on new technological developments that are revolutionizing global oil exploration. By some estimates the US has more untapped oil then has been drained out of everywhere in the world combined since the 1920s. Effectively, what we're doing is using offshore drilling technology ONshore. It lets us drill deeper and drill wider with a single drill head.
Sixth, as to cost increases... It's not any one oil company's fault if the price goes up or down. Oil companies don't have control over the price of oil any more then farmers have control over the price of corn. They TAKE prices they do not make them or set them. They put their oil on the market and it sells for a certain price. The only way they can manipulate price is by reducing production. If the US increases production then the price goes down. If the war on oil goes away then the price goes down.
Anyone who intentionally makes everyone's commute to work more expensive is going to have a hard time surviving on election day.
I think it's premature to rule one way or the other without looking very carefully at it.
If it's 45M for journalism classes and only that... then I feel it's probably a waste because we don't have a pressing need for huge numbers of journalists. The industry is already saturated.
If they wanted 45M for programming classes or something more practical then I might see it differently. But for journalism? Page layout is not that complicated. Why do high school students need to learn how to layout a newspaper when in all likelihood only one student out of a thousand will actually be a journalist. And of that, probably one out of a hundred thousand will actually lay pages out. And even then how long does it take a professional journalist to learn how to lay a page out?
The whole concept of a highly digital modern journalism class with expensive materials in this economic climate seems extremely wasteful and pointless.
My mind isn't closed on the issue but they'd have to make a REALLY good case for getting that kind of money for that kind of class.
Your comment is about as tone deaf as marie antoinette's comment about cake... or obama's suggestion that we use algae.
If you don't have a solution for me right now or within the next couple years you have no solution.
its like someone saying they're hungry and you responding "oh, you should build a tractor so you can plow that field"... Fantastic... but I'm hungry now. That comment is in no way helpful. Ideas that might yield a benifit in ten years when you have pressing issues RIGHT NOW are stupid suggestions.
If I tell you I'm thirsty and you respond "oh you should build an aqueduct"... That is in no way a solution to my problem.
The problem is FUEL NOW.
And the administration is frankly indifferent to the fuel prices. They've said as much repeatedly and even bragged about how high they are. So fine. If this is what they want, then they get to take responsibility for it.
Heads are rolling. If the europeans like getting ripped off at the pump, that's your business. I truly don't care. Not my country. In this country, we tend to at least try to not get scammed.
By actual price I mean the pre-tax open market price of a commodity, good, or service.
If you're paying eight dollars a gallon in Europe then you're not paying the pre tax open market price. While the actual price of the product that pump is what ever the gas station says it is... obviously were you to purchase the same thing on the open market you'd be paying a very different price.
I'm not interested in semantic games with you. You know what I mean.
The US is not Europe. There is greater distance between our population centers and most of our workers commute longer distances.
Increasing fuel costs are not something we can survive. Wise american politicians are taking it seriously... foolish ones are not. The public are fickle... and if irritated will turn on anyone they perceive as guilty. Such is the nature of politics.
Further, high fuel costs make everything more expensive. It makes food more expensive, it makes raw materials more expensive, it makes everything more expensive.
The net result of all that is that we're going to have to charge more for everything. That means the international cost of many goods will go up.
It should be noted that the trigger for the arab spring was rising food prices also related to fuel prices. Because of these fuel prices the cost of grain will keep going up which means we could get some very large famines throughout the third world.
This is not a minor issue. Fuel prices are high in europe mostly because of taxes... not the actual price of the fuel. When the actual price goes up it will force the european system to increase subsidies to industry to offset those costs... or suffer even worse economic problems.
As to behavior patterns being a give away... In this case, I don't see how that's a relevant point.
The idea is to disassociate BEFORE you're under investigation. Just tell everyone involved you need to take care of your sick mother and vanish. You can stay active but not with that group.
Smaller cells. You don't want to be known to more then three to five people. And ideally none of them should be able to compromise you. Don't get publicity. Don't get on the radar screen. Keep blended.
If you join some big loud group that's on the page of the new york times and likes to have giant meetings in consistent locations on the internet... then you've got a arrest me sign tapped to the back of your head.
As to the CIA operating in this incident... it's an international group so it could be arguing they're not operating within the US. In any case, my understanding is that the NSA would actually be the ones tracking them down. They're the intelligence branch that deals with computers, radio signals, encryption, etc. The CIA traditionally was more the up close and personal branch that would offer you cyanide breath mints. That said, who knows. The fact that the CIA is running the drone operations in Afghanistan is totally weird and not expected. One would think that would go through the airforce or army. Who knew.
As to infiltration... Oh my god... you need to read more spy novels.
OKAY... so if you're just starting out infiltration you might want to look to flip someone. You find someone that you've got dead to rights and you say "look, you can spend years in some horrible prison terrified you're going to get shanked in the night... OOOOR you can be a mole for us in one of these groups. Take it or leave it."
Then there are patriots... people that are part of these communities but don't like the direction they're going in and will betray that group simply because they don't like them. This can also be for revenge if they felt slighted. Either way, the intelligence service gets a mole in their organization.
Then there are traitors that will sell their friends out for money. Same as above only you need to pay them.
Net result, you're going to get a few sources inside the organization that are passing information to intelligence.
Then you have trained agents that go into these groups to collect information from the start. This is difficult but there are various ways to do it. If you have moles already operating in their system then they can train your agents to operate the same way.
Point being... if the agency wants in... they're getting in. The only way to keep them out is to remain small and obscure. That will make it hard for them to insert anyone into your group because there are so few members and if you're small they might not even know you exist.
That is your best defense as a hacker. You're a computer cat burglar. the idea is to remain invisible.
What anonymous are doing is akin to a group of cat burglars running around town and then bragging about all the homes they broke into... and how no one can stop them.
It doesn't get any dumber.
If anon weren't stupid, they'd take down their website, stop talking to the press, and just vanish. Then MAYBE they could start over with a smaller tight nit crew. And never talk to the press ever again. No public releases. No "this is from X"... none of that.
If you want to release something to the press, then do it. You can do that anonymously without calling yourself anonymous like some cheesy comic book villain.
If you do that repeatedly the intelligence agencies will be annoyed but they'll assume every leak came from a different source and not assume they're a singular entity. They'll also have no way of knowing who or where it came from. They'll probably suspect leaks in their own organization. Telling people it's a hacking group tells the intelligence people that the flaw is in their computer system. Why tell them that if your objective is to steal information from them?
And in regards to the other posts talking about anon fighting the good fight... Not so much. They're mostly masturbating on the internet while committing some amateur credit card fraud.
I don't think we've seen a single hack out of them that was particularly impressive. Most of it was denial of service stuff or hacking poorly secured websites.
And what have they accomplished? All they're doing is justifying government spending on computer security. They're also justifying increased classification of documents.
Over the past 20 years the government was DE-classifying lots of things that past generations would NEVER declassify. Because of wikileaks in particular things are being RE-classified and there is a decrease in what is being DE-classified.
If the goal is making government more open, that is a complete failure.
if they piss off the CIA and NSA... I'm not saying their prized pet poodles will be snatched by black ops and wisked away to secret dungeons to be water boarded... but at a certain point they have so many resources and legal loopholes at their disposal that screwing with them is not a survival trait.
I think a lot of hackers stay out of jail because no cares enough to track them down and not so much because they're eLiTe or whatever. What this sort of provocative actions do is put a taskforce that will be paid 7 days a week to hunt them. And that means any stupid illegal thing they've doubtless done and gotten away with... might come back to bit them in the ass... and then eat them alive.
If they hadn't actually broken any laws it might not be a huge issue for them. But I'm pretty sure they've broken lots including some identity theft and credit card fraud. You can go away for years for that. So if they want you... they can throw you in prison somewhere. All they have to do is find you.
If I were these guys... I'd be doing everything in my power to vanish and disassociate with the larger group.
Something we learned from the war on terror is that the CIA likes to infiltrate groups by posing as one of them. They do that either by taking out someone and then assuming their identity or simply entering the organization at a lower level.
A fair number of the people in anonymous at this point might actually be government operatives posing as allied hackers.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they testing someone in the same genetic pool that isn't a ginger? Because different ethnic groups are going to be conditioned to respond to and express things differently.
Personally, I have brown hair and a very high pain threshold. Everyone in my family is the same way and none of us are gingers. I further don't think it's genetic in our cases. We have an ingrained and conditioned intolerance to whining in ourselves and others. It's just a family thing. We don't express it and we don't respond to it.
So to take this seriously, I'd need to know they were doing an apples to apples comparison to remove cultural and ethnic distinctions.
Iran is a fascist state. Letting them have nuclear weapons is probably not a good idea. You don't know what they'll do with them.
Understand, if we had some assurence that Iran wouldn't do something crazy with them... then I wouldn't care. The US has no problem with the world having access to cheap abundant energy. To the contrary it is in our interest that as much of the world use such power.
Our worry is that strategically the more powers that have nuclear weapons the less effective MAD becomes at containing nuclear war. It's complicated and you have to understand systems theory to really grasp how the problems becomes exponential. But in a nutshell the more powers that have nuclear weapons the more likely a nuclear war becomes... and it's exponential.
Strategically the US wants to avoid a major nuclear war for as long as possible and try to make sure such a war is as limited as possible. The best way to do that is to limit nuclear weapons to the smallest number of powers possible.
It could be said that Iran and Israel counter each other. Unfortunately Israel is already countered by many other powers in the region. This actually imbalances the relationship requiring increased US backing to keep israel alive. That causes other problems in the world as US resources are finite and cannot always be relied upon.
It's very complicated... but in short... Iran really can't be allowed to have nuclear weapons. It could mean the death of billions if this gets out of control. It will not be limited to a couple nations. Empires will burn.
Well, without air superiority you're going to have to do a land invasion.
So either you control the skies or you don't.
Hole only needs to be about three feet wide... precision guided bomb can hit that. Furthermore shaped charges can have very specific blast patterns.
For example... lets say the bomb doesn't project much of a blast down but blasts UP. So you drop it and with kinetic force it goes pretty deep into the ground... and then it blasts UP shooting all that dirt and rock out of the hole. Now you've got a shaft... drop another bomb down the same hole. After you've got a hole that goes down a couple hundred feet... drop your big perpetrator bomb that given the head start of those couple hundred feet can eat right through the bunker.
It's also possible the military is lying. The military is very big on lying about stuff when they don't want the enemy to know. It could be that our existing generation of bombs can dig to that depth and destroy everything. So we tell them "oh that's really deep we might not be able to get that." We did that during the first gulf war when we made it look like we were going to invade Iraq by sea. It was a feint. The real attack came over land. We didn't use roads... we crossed the desert with tanks. This put Saddam's forces off balance as they had to scramble away from the coast to cover their rear by which time it was too late for their forces to be effective... and pretty much everything was wiped out without causing relevant US causalities.
Yeah I thought of that. Only the target has to actually be destroyed. If it's all intact down there then they can just dig it out later.
if we hit it, then it has to be completely contaminated and ruined.
As to the hole versus the crater... Possibly we should consider different ways to penetrate. Because if the single perpetrator can't get down and a second one can't follow it down the same hole... then we need to shift to something that makes a wider hole. Not a very wide hole... just wide enough to keep dropping bombs down.
Unlikely.
In the US mind, it would require Iran to not only acquire nuclear weapons but to possibly use them first before the US would consider any nuclear strike.
That is not to say we wouldn't use conventional bombs with nuclear level yield. One of the things the military is trying to build is conventional bombs with very high yield.
Look at the size of these bunker buster bombs. It would be much more efficient to use very small tactical nukes.
The explosive yield would be similar in a much smaller package... and scaling up would be very inexpensive.
However, the US is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid using nuclear weapons. Remember... a 1 megaton nuclear weapon is a bomb equivalent to a million tons of TNT. And a tactical nuke could be significantly smaller then a megaton bomb.
How many tons of C4 or some other exotic explosive is required before it really doesn't matter if it was nuclear or not?
That's what the US military wants. They want an UN-nuclear bomb. A bomb that can wipe out pretty much anything without triggering a political food fight.
If the US actually attacks Iran that isn't going to matter and if it doesn't then it doesn't matter.
So it doesn't matter.
to the point of it not mattering... Who says you need to drop one bomb on a target? Can't you just drop a bomb that makes a big crater... and then drop a bomb in the middle of that crater to make a deeper crater... and then drop a bomb in the middle of that crater to make a deeper crater... you see where I'm going here. Doubtless there are diminishing returns but I should think with a few penetrators all on the same target you could eat through to the bunker.
And it's sad that we're here to cheer about something that should have been the status quo in the first place.
The law never should made it illegal to record the police. I suspect this is mostly a law designed to protect slippery government officials from getting snagged by whistle blowers.
I any case... it's disgusting this ever was law in the first place.
The police cannot be a legitimate servant of the law or the people so long as such laws remain on the books. They are entirely and manifestly unacceptable.
They're gross... If I'm going to ban something then I might as well be honest about my motivation for it. Crazy girls are going to be crazy. You're not going to stop girls from starving themselves by removing skinny models anymore then you'll stop crazy boys from killing people by banning video games.
BUUUUT... they're gross... so ban them.
Feel the same way about those female body builders that look like they're smuggling breast implants in their arms. It's really nasty. I'm sure most women feel the same way about body builder men... though frankly that isn't as weird looking as the women who have broader chests then the average linebacker.
I do lots of things that can't be done in front of a computer... like walking or driving...
And I don't blame an art form for the militancy of a tiny minority in it's publishing industry that have created this monster.
Many artists are more against the RIAA then you are...
I think something the studio heads need to grasp is that the music going public has lost a lot and they're trying to get it back by often illegal means.
We can't even sell our digital downloads... where as past generations could resell music.
If the RIAA wants to get the current generation to take them seriously then they need to compromise somewhere. Strike a balance.
The RIAA needs to stop treating the public like the enemy or the public will treat the RIAA the same.
Paying off a bunch of politicians and running a little secret program to radically change the laws overnight without a proper public debate was a hostile act.
Stop doing that or you'll be regarded henceforth as an enemy to be wiped out.
Australia hasn't developed it's interior... the US has... they're not comparable. Remove a few big cities from Australia and there is very little there. Remove the same from the US and most of the country is still there.
It's night and day.
In any case, the politicians have made a miscalculation in thinking this would be acceptable. The only people with a chance of holding office are going to be people that say somewhere in their campaign speech "and we'll get gas prices down"...
No... you're confusing competition with growth.
You're right that within the european economies the high taxes will be competitive because all companies will have to pay them. But that doesn't mean that growth would be the same.
If the company has LESS capital to invest and the consumer has LESS capital to make purchases then you will depress growth.
Period.
Just like the Europeans... Oh wait, they're just as dependent on gas as us.
All this does is depress economic growth.
This beyond debate. Anyone that wants to argue this issue the way you people are arguing it will have no representation in government.
So I can only hope your counterparts in our own system are very upfront about these beliefs. It will make crushing them in the general child's play.
First off, we have radically reduced our fuel consumption. US fuel use has gone WAAAAY down. We can't use less then we're using right now. So conservation is no longer useful. Our consumption has gone way down and the prices have just gotten higher.
So our consumption is not linked to the prices nor can we lower our consumption further.
Second, reducing fuel consumption is not a great objective. We have been increasing out efficiency for generations. We do not need politicians intentionally making things worse.
Third, I do have a birthright to cheap fuel actually. My country has lots of untapped petroleum that could be processed into fuel cheaply. So I do have birthright to it.
Fourth, as I live in a democracy, my hostility can very easily be channeled into political action that will get what I want in the near future. So... wrong again.
Fifth, as to magic... not magic... Science. We've got huge oil strikes in the US that rely on new technological developments that are revolutionizing global oil exploration. By some estimates the US has more untapped oil then has been drained out of everywhere in the world combined since the 1920s. Effectively, what we're doing is using offshore drilling technology ONshore. It lets us drill deeper and drill wider with a single drill head.
Sixth, as to cost increases... It's not any one oil company's fault if the price goes up or down. Oil companies don't have control over the price of oil any more then farmers have control over the price of corn. They TAKE prices they do not make them or set them. They put their oil on the market and it sells for a certain price. The only way they can manipulate price is by reducing production. If the US increases production then the price goes down. If the war on oil goes away then the price goes down.
Anyone who intentionally makes everyone's commute to work more expensive is going to have a hard time surviving on election day.
for a high school journalism program it is excessive.
I think it's premature to rule one way or the other without looking very carefully at it.
If it's 45M for journalism classes and only that... then I feel it's probably a waste because we don't have a pressing need for huge numbers of journalists. The industry is already saturated.
If they wanted 45M for programming classes or something more practical then I might see it differently. But for journalism? Page layout is not that complicated. Why do high school students need to learn how to layout a newspaper when in all likelihood only one student out of a thousand will actually be a journalist. And of that, probably one out of a hundred thousand will actually lay pages out. And even then how long does it take a professional journalist to learn how to lay a page out?
The whole concept of a highly digital modern journalism class with expensive materials in this economic climate seems extremely wasteful and pointless.
My mind isn't closed on the issue but they'd have to make a REALLY good case for getting that kind of money for that kind of class.
Your comment is about as tone deaf as marie antoinette's comment about cake... or obama's suggestion that we use algae.
If you don't have a solution for me right now or within the next couple years you have no solution.
its like someone saying they're hungry and you responding "oh, you should build a tractor so you can plow that field"... Fantastic... but I'm hungry now. That comment is in no way helpful. Ideas that might yield a benifit in ten years when you have pressing issues RIGHT NOW are stupid suggestions.
If I tell you I'm thirsty and you respond "oh you should build an aqueduct"... That is in no way a solution to my problem.
The problem is FUEL NOW.
And the administration is frankly indifferent to the fuel prices. They've said as much repeatedly and even bragged about how high they are. So fine. If this is what they want, then they get to take responsibility for it.
Heads are rolling. If the europeans like getting ripped off at the pump, that's your business. I truly don't care. Not my country. In this country, we tend to at least try to not get scammed.
By actual price I mean the pre-tax open market price of a commodity, good, or service.
If you're paying eight dollars a gallon in Europe then you're not paying the pre tax open market price. While the actual price of the product that pump is what ever the gas station says it is... obviously were you to purchase the same thing on the open market you'd be paying a very different price.
I'm not interested in semantic games with you. You know what I mean.
The US is not Europe. There is greater distance between our population centers and most of our workers commute longer distances.
Increasing fuel costs are not something we can survive. Wise american politicians are taking it seriously... foolish ones are not. The public are fickle... and if irritated will turn on anyone they perceive as guilty. Such is the nature of politics.
Further, high fuel costs make everything more expensive. It makes food more expensive, it makes raw materials more expensive, it makes everything more expensive.
The net result of all that is that we're going to have to charge more for everything. That means the international cost of many goods will go up.
It should be noted that the trigger for the arab spring was rising food prices also related to fuel prices. Because of these fuel prices the cost of grain will keep going up which means we could get some very large famines throughout the third world.
This is not a minor issue. Fuel prices are high in europe mostly because of taxes... not the actual price of the fuel. When the actual price goes up it will force the european system to increase subsidies to industry to offset those costs... or suffer even worse economic problems.
As to behavior patterns being a give away... In this case, I don't see how that's a relevant point.
The idea is to disassociate BEFORE you're under investigation. Just tell everyone involved you need to take care of your sick mother and vanish. You can stay active but not with that group.
Smaller cells. You don't want to be known to more then three to five people. And ideally none of them should be able to compromise you. Don't get publicity. Don't get on the radar screen. Keep blended.
If you join some big loud group that's on the page of the new york times and likes to have giant meetings in consistent locations on the internet... then you've got a arrest me sign tapped to the back of your head.
As to the CIA operating in this incident... it's an international group so it could be arguing they're not operating within the US. In any case, my understanding is that the NSA would actually be the ones tracking them down. They're the intelligence branch that deals with computers, radio signals, encryption, etc. The CIA traditionally was more the up close and personal branch that would offer you cyanide breath mints. That said, who knows. The fact that the CIA is running the drone operations in Afghanistan is totally weird and not expected. One would think that would go through the airforce or army. Who knew.
As to infiltration... Oh my god... you need to read more spy novels.
OKAY... so if you're just starting out infiltration you might want to look to flip someone. You find someone that you've got dead to rights and you say "look, you can spend years in some horrible prison terrified you're going to get shanked in the night... OOOOR you can be a mole for us in one of these groups. Take it or leave it."
Then there are patriots... people that are part of these communities but don't like the direction they're going in and will betray that group simply because they don't like them. This can also be for revenge if they felt slighted. Either way, the intelligence service gets a mole in their organization.
Then there are traitors that will sell their friends out for money. Same as above only you need to pay them.
Net result, you're going to get a few sources inside the organization that are passing information to intelligence.
Then you have trained agents that go into these groups to collect information from the start. This is difficult but there are various ways to do it. If you have moles already operating in their system then they can train your agents to operate the same way.
Point being... if the agency wants in... they're getting in. The only way to keep them out is to remain small and obscure. That will make it hard for them to insert anyone into your group because there are so few members and if you're small they might not even know you exist.
That is your best defense as a hacker. You're a computer cat burglar. the idea is to remain invisible.
What anonymous are doing is akin to a group of cat burglars running around town and then bragging about all the homes they broke into... and how no one can stop them.
It doesn't get any dumber.
If anon weren't stupid, they'd take down their website, stop talking to the press, and just vanish. Then MAYBE they could start over with a smaller tight nit crew. And never talk to the press ever again. No public releases. No "this is from X"... none of that.
If you want to release something to the press, then do it. You can do that anonymously without calling yourself anonymous like some cheesy comic book villain.
If you do that repeatedly the intelligence agencies will be annoyed but they'll assume every leak came from a different source and not assume they're a singular entity. They'll also have no way of knowing who or where it came from. They'll probably suspect leaks in their own organization. Telling people it's a hacking group tells the intelligence people that the flaw is in their computer system. Why tell them that if your objective is to steal information from them?
Think
there is a distinction between responsible whistle blowing and prankster whistle blowing... wikileaks doesn't seem to grasp the distinction.
rephrase please...
And in regards to the other posts talking about anon fighting the good fight... Not so much. They're mostly masturbating on the internet while committing some amateur credit card fraud.
I don't think we've seen a single hack out of them that was particularly impressive. Most of it was denial of service stuff or hacking poorly secured websites.
And what have they accomplished? All they're doing is justifying government spending on computer security. They're also justifying increased classification of documents.
Over the past 20 years the government was DE-classifying lots of things that past generations would NEVER declassify. Because of wikileaks in particular things are being RE-classified and there is a decrease in what is being DE-classified.
If the goal is making government more open, that is a complete failure.
if they piss off the CIA and NSA... I'm not saying their prized pet poodles will be snatched by black ops and wisked away to secret dungeons to be water boarded... but at a certain point they have so many resources and legal loopholes at their disposal that screwing with them is not a survival trait.
I think a lot of hackers stay out of jail because no cares enough to track them down and not so much because they're eLiTe or whatever. What this sort of provocative actions do is put a taskforce that will be paid 7 days a week to hunt them. And that means any stupid illegal thing they've doubtless done and gotten away with... might come back to bit them in the ass... and then eat them alive.
If they hadn't actually broken any laws it might not be a huge issue for them. But I'm pretty sure they've broken lots including some identity theft and credit card fraud. You can go away for years for that. So if they want you... they can throw you in prison somewhere. All they have to do is find you.
If I were these guys... I'd be doing everything in my power to vanish and disassociate with the larger group.
Something we learned from the war on terror is that the CIA likes to infiltrate groups by posing as one of them. They do that either by taking out someone and then assuming their identity or simply entering the organization at a lower level.
A fair number of the people in anonymous at this point might actually be government operatives posing as allied hackers.
It's also very very easy to blame the guy that was there for a day and then not there the next to defend himself.
I've run into a few situations where a coworker blamed mistakes they made on someone that was recently fired or only came to the office occasionally.
Why not after all?... what are they going to say in their defense?